##Turning a 3d model into a plastic thing

Today, on sites like thingiverse.com and youmagine.com, people share 3d models that you can print on your printer. The standard file format for those models is STL. The STL file describes only the surface geometry of the object by a list of triangles and containing arbitrary units, but by convention in the 3d printing community are treated as millimeters. It doesn’t have any other info in it, like how thick to make the walls, what’s the best way to fill in the body, color, etc. There have recently been moves to use AMF and some of the software supports it.

We’re still a long way away from being able to easily share a file and expect it to come out the same for you as it did for me. On top of the missing information in the file format, different printers vary widely in their capabilities as well as their current state of calibration, etc. In addition, since many of the tools and languages are under current development there are many differences on things that will eventually become “standards” (hopefully).

An STL file gets turned into plastic by first “slicing” the STL model into gcode (in a .gcode file) and then translating that gcode text file into a binary representation that my flavor of printer understands x3g (in an .x3g file). I put that x3g file onto an SD card using my PC. Put the SD card into the printer and tell it to print it.

So for my printer, the way one of those STL files gets printed is to first translate the 3d model into instructions for the printer. Sometimes this is called a toolpath. The tool that does this is called a slicer because it slices the model up into thin (usually 0.2mm for me) horizontal slices and starting from the bottom describes a path in a language called gcode to fill in that layer and move to the next.

##Slicers

I have four different slicers installed on my computer and three different engines that translate from gcode to x3g for the SD card:

With the first two, they have both a slicer and an x3g converter for translating from gcode to x3g.

  • MakerWare Desktop - MakerWare’s proprietary software that they make available online for free. It works with the MakerBot clones like FlashForge.

  • ReplicatorG - This is the open source 3d printer management software that came with my printer. It embeds the Skeinforge slicer. It also is the tool I use to update the firmware on my printer. It looks abandoned. The last release is from November 2012. I think MakerBot used to use it, recommend it maybe? Before my time in 3d printing. Which is easy to do since I just started. It looks like there’s a fork maintained by Dan Newman that is getting traffic, so maybe it isn’t dead.

For these next two, I use GPX, an open source tool written by Dr. Henry Thomas to convert gcode to x3g.

  • Slic3r - Open source project created by Alessandro Ranellucci for his own reasons, but now is sponsored by Lulzbot, I believe.

  • Cura - Cura is open source maintained/supported by Ultimachine as the main software for their printers.

You can also run generated gcode from one of those slicers through ReplicatorG to make the x3g file, but it’s more convient for me to use GPX because it can run nicely standalone and most tools have a way for it to run on the gcode automatically when the gcode file is generated.

Some other slicers that I’m aware of, but haven’t tried yet:

  • Simplify3D

  • KISSlicer

Each of these has different strengths and weaknesses, so I find that I use them all from time to time depending on what I’m doing.

That started out as a little background for what I really sat down to write about which is gcode variation. I got a little carried away so I’ll hang on to the gcode variation for the next post.